College-bound high school seniors are probably visiting universities with their parents, attending college fairs and researching online to help them decide where to apply in the coming months. We just hope they don’t get caught up in all the college rankings these days by websites, educational groups and others.

One of the most popular, U.S. News & World Report’s annual Best Colleges, was released Tuesday, and the self-congratulatory news releases from colleges soon followed. In our newsroom, we can always count on a release from Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, which this year noted the small Catholic school “received high marks in the newest editions of all the top annual college guides, both Catholic and secular, including The Princeton Review, WhatWillTheyLearn.com, Kiplinger and the National Catholic Register.” And that long list doesn’t include Washington Monthly, Money, Forbes, U.S. Department of Education (College Scoreboard) and others that also rank colleges.

So what should seniors make of all this? Not much, we believe. While U.S. News and some others offer valuable cost, demographic, academic and other data about colleges, the rankings themselves are subjective and do not answer the key question for any senior: What college is the best fit for me?

Valerie Strauss, who covers education for the Washington Post, noted last week that “undergraduate academic reputation” accounts for 22.5 percent of a college’s ranking under U.S. News’ methodology. U.S. News surveys presidents, provosts and deans at rival institutions, and some “have told me over the years that they don’t fill out the forms themselves because they don’t really have a deep understanding of other schools’ programs,” Strauss wrote. It also surveys high school counselors, “but their jobs are to find the best student-college fit, not figure out which school is better than the other,” she wrote.

Politico this month completed a review that shows the rankings actually promote economic inequality by creating “incentives for schools to favor wealthier students over less wealthy applicants.” It cited Southern Methodist University in Dallas, which “conducted a billion-dollar fundraising drive devoted to many of the areas ranked by U.S. News, including spending more on faculty and recruiting students with higher SAT scores.” Southern Methodist then jumped in the rankings, while Georgia State University, a model for graduating lower-income students, dropped 30 spots.

And don’t forget that colleges self-report most of the data. Several years ago, an admissions dean at Claremont McKenna College was caught submitting data that inflated its SAT and ACT scores and lowered its admission rate — all to improve its rankings.

For the record, U.S. News this year ranked California Lutheran University as 14th best and CSU Channel Islands as 66th among 141 colleges in its Regional Universities West category. Thomas Aquinas was 58th among 233 “National Liberal Arts Colleges.”

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, the real work begins for seniors and their parents.